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Uber Technologies Inc., the popular ride-hailing company, entered 2017 having doubled its bookings in 2016 and achieving a valuation of nearly $70 billion, making it the largest venture capital-backed company in the world. Co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick embodied the company, with a hard-charging attitude embedded in the company’s workplace culture that allowed it to successfully take on the entrenched taxi industry. Uber looked to enjoy another year of global growth in 2017, until lawsuits and a cascading series of scandals surrounding that same workplace culture led a group of powerful investors to seek Kalanick’s resignation to protect their investment. This case presents an overview of the growth of Uber, the impact of Kalanick, and the role that Uber’s board of directors had in shaping the company’s growth. It centers on the factors leading to Uber board members and investors to call for Kalanick’s resignation, focusing on how board oversight can help shape company culture and how entrepreneurial boards deal with founder CEOs. It then deals with the events that happened in the aftermath of Kalanick's resignation, including the appointment of Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO and the changes, the lawsuit brought against Kalanick by venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, and the governance changes proposed at the end of September 2017.

Organizations must constantly innovate, or else they may suffer consequences that range in severity. In low-stakes situations, they may lose a small opportunity for growth; and in high-stakes situations, they may lose significant market share that threatens their survival. Collaboration is becoming increasingly common for innovation in organizational settings, but higher-stakes conditions create a variety of pressures that undermine collaborators’ ability to innovate. In this study, we investigate why some collaborations are more innovative than others when the stakes are higher, and our results have important theoretical implications. In particular, we found that when the stakes are low, unfamiliar partners had a positive effect on innovation and were more innovative than highly familiar partners; but when the stakes were high, we found that highly familiar partners had a positive effect on innovation and were more innovative than unfamiliar partners. While prior research has shown that highly familiar partners typically undermine innovation through less divergent thinking during idea generation, we found that they enhanced innovation through greater risk-taking during idea selection. As a result, our findings suggest there is an underlying tension between factors that promote divergence during idea generation and factors that promote convergence during idea selection – both of which are necessary for high-stakes innovation.

In this essay, my goal is to explore why, despite the tireless efforts of talented people, research on corporate governance has been slow and uneven, and where that research should turn to next to be most valuable to practitioners. My belief is that the most fruitful work thus far has recognized that corporate boards are dynamic social systems, has identified all the forces that shape those systems, and has acknowledged that boards should seek to represent a wide variety of stakeholders, not just shareholders. The best way for me to establish this argument is to trace the history of research on corporate boards and analyze the trends in that research, including the relative value of the types of data that researchers in this field have used. Ultimately, I identify what I consider to be the best path forward in studying these complex social systems. I have made a deliberate choice to focus primarily on research that reflects firsthand experience with boards rather than on research that utilizes data derived from questionnaires and other secondary sources. Not everyone will agree with my choices, but my hope is that my perspective will nonetheless provide some guidance for people working in this evolving field to understand the true complexity of corporate boards.